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Saturday, October 4, 2014

Tala Haikal: "It may not be possible to immediately free all the kidnapped girls and women due to the scope of the conflict with ISIS and the geographical dispersal of the captives in various locations. Some of these women and girls can be freed only once ISIS is destroyed."

Haikal is a Middle East analyst at the American Task Force on Palestine, a think tank in Washington, DC. She tweets @talamay.

"ISIS has kidnapped an estimated 4,000 Iraqi girls and women
from Yazidi and other minority groups for the purpose of selling them
to locals or donating them to loyal jihadists. Sadly this is not unique
-- traces of sexual slavery are still evident in various parts of the
world, despite legislation prohibiting it -- but these crimes are being
committed on an extraordinary scale by ISIS. While these barbaric
rapists are fulfilling their sexual perversions the world is silently
watching. Instead, the international community must work to free the
Iraqi women and bring accountability to the chronically neglected issue
of the victimization of women in wars.

The kidnapped women and girls
are generally separated into small groups. Their price varies between
$25 and $1000. Some are as young as 12 years old. ISIS has beheaded 17
of them. There have been at least 11 reported cases of suicide,
according to an email response from the Human Rights Department at
Iraq’s Foreign Ministry to this writer. As described by Liz Sly of the Washington Post,
only a conversion to Islam can “upgrade” the status of these captives
from prison inmates to “comfort wives.”"